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Sam Nelson

In article ,
says...

On 25 Feb 2009 08:22:40 GMT, "Bob Eager" wrote:

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:16:16 UTC, Froot Bat wrote:

No, the point is that you are naive to the point of absurdity.

Sigh. Yet another idiot who tries to affect Having A Clue by simply
attacking someone, without making any attempt to provide an argument,
let alone back it up. Probably because he doesn't even know what the
point of this discussion is.

Go ahead then Bob, explain what's naive.

You're naive because you expect Usenet to be provided for free.

Okay give me a point in history where people had to pay to use it. Ie,
where it was not free. You may include today if you're so confident
that it's not free.

There are histories of Usenet out there. Read one. If you were a
student using a university's news server, it was bundled into fees, for
example. It wasn't free. I dunno about anyone else, but I am not here
to give you a history lesson.

On the contrary, most (if not all) of the top 100 websites (as ranked
by Alexa) are free to use, and they are orders of magnitude more
expensive and resource hungry than a non-binary Usenet server.

#1-#3 are paid for by advertising. #4 and #5 are paid for by Microsoft
and advertising. #6, MySpace? Advertising. #7, Wikipedia. Oh,
there's an interesting one. It's free at the point of use if you're a
sponger, but you can donate if you choose to. Ever donated to
Wikipedia?

eBay is most definitely not free at the point of use, unless perhaps
you only ever buy. Every single seller pays for it, during every
single sale.

Mostly, though, the model is `someone's marketing budget' be it the
owner of the site, or paid advertising. So far, the advertisers must
reckon it's worth it. Beats me how. Back in the days when I was
helping to run the world's first internet search engine, it was a
constant struggle to cope with the required capacity and were on the
edge of either giving up or asking for a real budget just when
Altavista appeared, at which point, suddenly, no-one much wanted to use
JumpStation any more. The notion of paying for it with advertising a)
never occurred to us and b) wouldn't have been possible in the
circumstances.

You not only have no idea how Usenet works, you simply have no idea
how business works either, do you?

Some might say you're naive to the point of absurdity.

Count me in.

Isn't half term over? Or are you playing truant?

Try and stick to the point, Bob, if you ever stumble across one. I
doubt even you're impressed at such lame would-be insults.

So, you're allowed to insult people, roundly, but if anyone insults you
they lose because they aren't sticking to the point?
--
SAm.